Meet Josie

Josie M. Rosario, LMSW, MSEd is a bruja, writer, and licensed therapist. A bilingual, bicultural Black Dominican-American woman, native New Yorker, and proud daughter of immigrants, she is a descendent of healers in the 21 Divisiones tradition in the Dominican Republic. Her work lives at the intersection of identity, relationships, and spiritual integration, and in service of liberation and community.

Given the moniker "Josie with the Gems" by her social media audience for her sharp, culturally-grounded commentary on relationships, identity and healing, Josie now writes a Substack by the same name where she explores those same themes in long form.

Through her work as a therapist and a former business coach, Josie saw a striking parallel: transformation that truly sticks comes from who you’re willing to become, not better strategy or sharper insight. Today she mentors entrepreneurs and spiritually-integrated clinicians at identity thresholds and through Venus+Legacy, she and her team hold the relational side of that same work, providing spiritually-integrated therapy for relationships at the threshold of becoming something new.

Josie is a two-time graduate of Columbia University, earning distinction from its School of Social Work and the faculty-selected Campbell Award for exceptional leadership. She completed the Social Work and Diversity Program and a four-year clinical residency in couples and family therapy at the Ackerman Institute for the Family, and holds advanced training in Emotionally-Focused Therapy (EFT). She's also a breathwork facilitator and yoga teacher.

She's been featured on HBO, Refinery29, PopSugar and mindbodygreen, including numerous health and wellness podcasts, sharing insights on mental health, relational wellness, and spiritually-integrated healing approaches. She’s also partnered with brands like CapitalOne, Spotify and Twitter to support their teams and specifically, employee wellbeing.

Guiding Values

Everything I do begins from the belief that the spiritual and the human were never separate. These are the values that follow from that.

  • What I say, offer, and practice are the same thing. I won't offer you a path I haven't walked myself, or name a truth I don’t live. Coherence you can feel is the only kind I trust.

  • Nothing here moves in one direction. What passes between you and I is the medicine, and it goes both ways: I'm changed by the work as much as you are. I may be further along in the journey than you, but we are still in it. Together.

  • The goal is never to depend on me. Everything I do is in service of helping you return you to your own authority: your body, knowing, and capacity to choose. I may hold your hand in the threshold, but you cross it. If I help you become more yourself than when you started working with me, my job is done.

  • I am in service to something older than me, and devotion is how I stay faithful to it. In a world that treats the sacred as a resource to extract for your own betterment, devotion insists on the opposite: there are obligations here, and I keep them whether or not it's convenient or it rewards me today. This work is a covenant, a daily return and tending that continues beyond when it feels good.

Healing is Generational Wealth

I partnered with HBO to lend my expertise on generational healing as a daughter of immigrants.

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Four Ways to Sit with Me

  • Ideas & Conversations

    Newsletter: Josie with the Gems

    Essays, cultural commentary and conversations about identity, relationships, and purpose - all through a spiritual and human lens. If you’re new to my world, I suggest you start here.

  • Just for You

    Astrology + Tarot | Private Mentorship

    Some parts of your path are yours to walk on your own, but with support. This is the work for those seasons: the quiet, necessary stretches that ask for solitude before anything else, and for someone in your corner while you cross.

  • Your Most Important Bonds

    Relational Therapy + Coaching

    For two or more people trying to stay, change, or cross something together. Deep work for lovers, friends, family, and business partners. This is the container for the relationship itself.

  • Your Body as an Ally

    COMING SOON!

    This is work that lands below language. Movement, breath, and community to summon your bodily wisdom. Come to be in a room, in your body, held by rhythm and others doing the same.